Yekaterina Goncharova is a graduate of the St Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire where she studied with Galina Kiselyova. From 2009 to 2012 she was a soloist with the St Petersburg Conservatoire Opera and Ballet Theatre. In 2008 she appeared in a concert performance of the opera Carmen under the baton of Mariss Jansons as Micaëla. In October 2010 she made her debut at the Philharmonie in Cologne in a concert with Montserrat Caballé. In 2011 she made her Mariinsky Theatre debuts as Micaëla (Carmen) and then joined the Mariinsky Opera Company.

She sang the main women's parts at the Mariinsky premieres of Faust, Otello, Eugene Onegin (directed by A. Stepanyuk), War and Peace (directed by G. Vic), and The Oprichnik. Yekaterina Goncharova was the first singer in Russia to perform Cleopatra and the Serpent by Rodion Shchedrin (2012, Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre). Later she participated in the world premiere of his opera Lefthander (2013) and the first Mariinsky performance of Boyarina Morozova, a choral opera by the composer (2014).

In 2016, Yekaterina Goncharova debuted at the Savonlinna Opera Festival as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello and sang Tatiana in Eugene Onegin and Natasha in War and Peace on tour in East Asia with the Mariinsky company. She also has toured Russia, Spain and Poland.